Hi,
I've been experimenting with PostgreSQL for the last few months (for fun,
learning, and a diversion from grad school), listening to the
conversations on the hacker and general mailing lists, and overall getting
a feel for the database. During this period of significant achievement
(the release of 7.0 and commercial support offerings all in one week), I
want to share my great enthusiasm for PG with the core team as well as all
other developers. This is a great product and you're doing a wonderful
service to the community.
I'm particularly impressed by many of the attributes of this
product/process to which Ross and Tom alluded in the previous emails.
Chief among these is the open development process and a team comprised of
articulate, helpful, and cooperative participants. I've followed design
disagreements and collaboration on final decisions and implementations,
and I see none of the Dilbertesque turf wars over who proposed what. But
most importantly, I think, is the developers' honesty and forthrightness
about the limitations of PostgreSQL and the ways in which it can be
improved. While there's little chance, with open-source software, of bugs
being classified as features (a la Oracle), this is even less of a
possibility within the PostgreSQL community, as the developers' ethics
and desires are in the right place (aligned with their own interests and
those of the community as a whole) and they're the first to acknowledge
problems (rather than hiding them in 250,000 lines of source for the user
to find).
To comment specifically about the Great Bridge announcement of commercial
support for PostgreSQL: I believe that this is a important milestone for
further acceptance of PG in mission-critical areas. I also think that
Ross captured the anxious, cautious exuberance that many developers and
users of Postgres share during this evolutionary period, and I was
heartened by the care with which Tom and the other developers appear to be
considering the long-term ramifications of this development. This
attention is warranted and very positive, I believe.
On a final note, I would like to suggest a discussion concerning the legal
framework of the PostgreSQL development effort. Tom mentioned that
upcoming discussions would focus on the Postgres license, and I agree with
him that such discussions can be delayed. However, I think it would be
fruitful to consider at the same time the tangential creation of a legal
corporation in The PostgreSQL Foundation, to be modelled (to some degree,
with developer and community input, of course) after The Apache Software
Foundation, or a similar open-source consortium, such as Debian governance
or KDE foundation. I think such a foundation could be a more forceful
legal body than PostgreSQL, Inc., to advance the cause of PostgreSQL as it
could have a more focused mission and by-laws taylored to its distributed
developer and user communities. I include (below) a modification of the
Apache description of its foundation (as well as links to the original) as
the basis for discussion for The PostgreSQL Foundation. Obviously,
lawyers should be involved to turn the community sentiment on a PostgreSQL
foundation into a legal entity, but hopefully this will be a start.
These lawyers should probably be separate from those of Great Bridge, if
possible, to prevent any potential conflict of interest or appearance of
impropriety. Obviously, that costs money (maybe $1000-2500?); hopefully
PostgreSQL users can contribute something to make this foundation a strong
legal guardian of PostgreSQL, complementing the demonstrated efforts of
the developers and our community. I would pledge $50 to start such an
undertaking (not significant monetarily, but grad students such as
myself must make gestures or employ sweat equity :)
I apologize for the length of these thoughts (especially coming in the
form of my first post in this community) and again heartily congratulate
the team on such meaningful dual accomplishments of PG7.0 and commercial
support.
Sincerely,
Dan Freedman
------------------
Apache bylaws: www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html
Apache foundation: www.apache.org/foundation/
Draft modification (of above ASF) to describe The PostgreSQL Foundation:
(intended only to provoke discussion)
The PostgreSQL Foundation (PGF) is a membership-based, not-for-profit
corporation. Individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to
collaborative open-source software development, through sustained
participation and contributions within the Foundation's projects, are
eligible for membership in the PGF. An individual is awarded membership
after nomination and approval by a majority of the existing PGF members.
Thus, the PGF is governed by the community it most directly serves -- the
people collaborating within its projects. The PGF members periodically
elect a Board of Directors to manage the organizational affairs of the
Foundation, as accorded by the PGF Bylaws. The Board, in turn, appoints a
number of officers to oversee the day-to-day operations of the Foundation.
The Foundation is a collaborative project of the PGF. Our goal is to build
and sustain the literal foundation upon which our open-source software
projects are based.
